ISLAMIC Astrology And Astronomy

Agrippa’s lists of the Mansions of the Moon and their images appear to be derived in turn from the Picatrix, possibly the best-known magical text dealing with the Mansions. Although it was only available in manuscript form at the time when Yeats was working, there are copies in Oxford, London and Paris; MacGregor Mathers who ‘had copied many manuscripts on ceremonial magic and doctrine in the British Museum, and was to copy many more in Continental libraries’ (Au 183) would almost certainly have known it. The Picatrix not only uses the positional Mansions of the Moon (see Frank Pearce Sturm, 83-87), considering the role of Yeats’s Kusta ben Luka, he mentioned Arabian philosophers and astrologers, referring to Alkindi, Albumazar, Thebit ben Corat and Rhazes, as well as a manuscript in the Bodleian "entitled The Book of the 28 Images of the Moon and the 28 Mansions and the 54 Angels Who Serve the Images". He noted that in "the Middle Ages, when Arabian learning was lost, the Images of the Moon became the 28 Judges of Geomantic Divination". Sturm also claimed very particular knowledge:


I know a deal about this that is in no book, for it comes from the memory of one long dead. For twenty-five years some mind that is not my own has tried to force me to write a certain system of philosophy, but I am not yet convinced that it is worth writing. I used to think that the spirit of a monk, burnt for heresy early in the 12th century was my informant, but I would rather believe him to have been myself in a past life, as I once saw him in a crystal vision, with a tonsured head sticking out of a cowl, in a big gloomy lecture hall. He died with his book in his mind, & now troubles me with his uncompleted task. When I am in that mood I take up a pen and make up sentences out of his book. I have a whole collection of them, and if I don’t call the automatic writing it is not because I don’t believe they are.
(Frank Pearce Sturm, 85)